

alphalist.CTO Podcast - For CTOs and Technical Leaders
Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast
This podcast features interviews of CTOs and other technical leadership figures and topics range from technology (AI, blockchain, cyber, DevOps, Web Architecture, etc.) to management (e.g. scaling, structuring teams, mentoring, technical recruiting, product etc.).
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
Guests from leading tech companies share their best practices and knowledge.
The goal is to support other CTOs on their journey through tech and engineering, inspire and allow a sneak-peek into other successful companies to understand how they think and act. Get awesome insights into the world‘s top tech companies, personalities with this podcast brought to you by Tobias Schlottke.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jul 1, 2021 • 45min
#29 - Matthias Jugel // Co-Founder of UBIRCH
EU vaccination passes and other uses of crypto and blockchain for verification
We spoke to Matthias Jugel, the co-founder of ubirch, the company behind the 🇩🇪 German digital vaccination passes 💉His technology has generated over 30 million vaccine passes giving Germans their summer holidays back! And they launched in a matter of weeks!
We discussed
What was involved in creating digital vaccine passports that worked OFFLINE and allow movement around the EU 🇪🇺
Blockchain verification ✔️ and its applications in pharmaceuticals⚕️, car insurance 🚘 and manufacturing 🏭
what he learnt from launching a national program in less than a month! 📆
Listen on Apple: || Spotify: || Deezer
BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Sastrify and Fastly
Sastrify
Thanks a lot to my friends at Sastrify for sponsoring this episode.
A lot of CTOs I know are responsible for procurement of software as a service tools by accident and never have the time and energy to work on optimizing their costs.
For example: at my company OMR, we have a lot of tools… Gsuite, Adobe creative cloud, Newrelic and many more.
Sastrify helps companies like ours to optimize those costs & negotiate with suppliers of such software.
In our case they helped us to save around 20.000€ per year, which is a lot if you look at our company size of around 150 people.
It is a simple and hassle-free process we went through and I can just recommend anyone listening to do the same. They actually promise to save more money than they cost.
They are already working with a lot of alphalist members such as Runstatic, Westwing and Emma.
They are giving a 50% discount for the first 3 months to all podcast listeners so go to www.sastrify.com/alphalist to get started today
Fastly
This episode is again kindly supported by Fastly, the biggest challenger in the CDN market and a solution I personally use.
Fastly is pushing ahead the technical boundaries and is from my personal perspective the best solution on the market. Fastly is one of the key drivers of the "edge cloud trend".
Well-known customers of Fastly are Shopify, The New York Times, Reddit, Github and many many more.
If you want to try it all with first class support, just go to fastly.com/alphalist

Jun 17, 2021 • 50min
#28 - Rasmus Rothe // founder of Merantix
AI trends and applications
We spoke to Rasmus Roth, leader in AI space- he has 5 products just based on machine learning.
What is involved in productising and commercialising a machine learning-based service 📈➡️💰
The need for ML ops 👨💻
Google Cloud vs AWS vs Azure and why he doesn’t stick to one ☁️
AI and its applications in medical field ⚕️, autonomous driving 🚘and BI 📊
His go-to resources for libraries, ML ops and conferences
BROUGHT TO YOU BY:
Fastly and Sastrify
Fastly
This episode is again kindly supported by Fastly, the biggest challenger in the CDN market and a solution I personally use.
Fastly is pushing ahead the technical boundaries and is from my personal perspective the best solution on the market. Fastly is one of the key drivers of the "edge cloud trend".
Well-known customers of Fastly are Shopify, The New York Times, Reddit, Github and many many more.
If you want to try it all with first class support, just go to fastly.com/alphalist
Sastrify
Thanks a lot to my friends at Sastrify for sponsoring this episode.
A lot of CTOs I know are responsible for procurement of software as a service tools by accident and never have the time and energy to work on optimizing their costs.
For example: at my company OMR, we have a lot of tools… Gsuite, Adobe creative cloud, Newrelic and many more.
Sastrify helps companies like ours to optimize those costs & negotiate with suppliers of such software.
In our case they helped us to save around 20.000€ per year, which is a lot if you look at our company size of around 150 people.
It is a simple and hassle-free process we went through and I can just recommend anyone listening to do the same. They actually promise to save more money than they cost.
They are already working with a lot of alphalist members such as Runstatic, Westwing and Emma.
They are giving a 50% discount for the first 3 months to all podcast listeners so go to www.sastrify.com/alphalist to get started today

Jun 3, 2021 • 1h 9min
#27 - Eric Johnson // CTO GitLab
Eric Johnson, CTO of GitLab, discusses managing remote teams, using git for everything, servant-leadership vs situational leadership, and balancing parenthood and career. They also explore the benefits of remote work, importance of taking time off, and factors in hiring and determining salaries.

May 20, 2021 • 52min
#26 - John Romero // CEO Romero Games
This Podcast episode is DOOMed 🔥🌋😈🧟🕯👿☠👹🦹
I had the chance to talk to John Romero, the inventor of DOOM, Wolfenstein and Commander Keen and founder of id Software about
Developing games in the early 90s and how they developed DOOM in a crazy small team
Developing games in 2021 and how it’s still possible to develop games with only a single person team
The crazy amounts of money they made with DOOM 🤑💶🤑
The crazy amounts of energy drinks they consumed
Why not he would not start developing a game engine again
Thanks a lot John! Was really fun talking to you.

May 6, 2021 • 1h 23min
#25 - Tim O'Reilly // Founder & CEO O'Reilly Media
Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media, discusses writing as a superpower, the origins of OSCON and great nerdy 90s, the tectonic 'Platform changes' and algorithmic rents, wrong incentives in our economy, and our role in 'the machine' deciding good vs bad.

Apr 29, 2021 • 1h 9min
#24 - Peter Grosskopf // Ex CTO Börse Stuttgart & Solarisbank
Blockchain 101 for CTOs
In this episode we dive deep into the principles of Blockchain together with Peter Grosskopf who is our guest for the 2nd time.
Peter recently quit his job as CTO @ Börse Stuttgart to fully focus on building a decentralized bank in the DeFi (Decentralize finance) space.
We spoke about:
How does a blockchain work
Why to use blockchains
Concrete use-cases and applications
How ether works and how to get started

Apr 8, 2021 • 1h 11min
#23 - Olivier Bonnet // CTO BlaBlaCar
This time I had Olivier Bonnet, the CTO of BlaBlaCar in the podcast.
BlaBlaCar is the carpooling company: They own the market.
They are active in 22 Countries, have 100M+ Users and acquired 12 other carpooling companies.
Olivier, the CTO, joined me to talk about:
How his time at Apple taught him to think long term
100 million users, 12 acquisitions: The strategy behind BlaCar
The complexity of route planning 🌐
How writing 🖊️ helps people at Bla to structure their thoughts: They are writing press releases for new features, Amazon style.
You build it, you run it! How technology decision discipline works at BlaCar
Was a great ride with you, Olivier! We both turned out to be a bit more Bla ;-) in this episode than we initially thought.

Mar 25, 2021 • 55min
#22 - Frank Karlitschek // CEO NextCloud
How to make a living from Open Source?
My guest Frank Karlitschek, the CEO of ☁️☁️ NextCloud ☁️☁️ the open alternative to Google Cloud and Microsofts Office 365 (!) does it for years and tells us where to start. He knows the game!
Other topics we touch?
The 3 Ultimate tipps for open source developers/publishers
How he leads his team of 50+ FTE almost fully remote
How GDPR can be seen as a chance for European entrepreneurs
How he built his company without any VC money
Thanks a lot Frank for being my guest!

Mar 11, 2021 • 1h 5min
#21 - Jason Warner // CTO GitHub
In this episode I talk to Jason Warner, Github CTO aka "the PaaS Guru". He used to work for Heroku before and
explained what he's planning and executing at Github and how Github uses it's massive amount of data to go away
from pure repo-hosting.
Topics that stand out:
How Microsoft is working out quite well for them (Careful: contains Steve Balmer rants)
How Github will revolutionize the Platform as a Service world (PaaS)
His thoughts about developer productivity and the broken idea of measuring an individual engineers performance 📈📈📈
How he breaks down the organization strategy into mission, vision, priorities, goals, and tasks to get everyone aligned
He also reveals his past as 🏋️ Fitness Guru, having written multiple fitness books and what happened when a colleague found that out…

Feb 25, 2021 • 51min
#20 - John Graham Cumming // CTO Cloudflare
This time I spoke to John Graham-Cumming, the CTO of 🌩 Cloudflare🌩, a publicly listed CDN and
Edge Computing platform.
Topics we touched:
His GNU Make book ;-)
How they grew to 25 BN marketcap 📈
What he thinks about edge computing and concrete usecases for it
How COVID changed the security world
How they operate and maintain a global network with millions of servers
Thanks a lot John for the Chat. Looking forward to see what Cloudflare comes up with next.